Cambodia Bible Education Centre

This weekend has seen the wonderful inclusion of two more young people into the household of faith. Sister Son Phab and Brother Krouch Saory were baptised into the sin covering name of Jesus Christ on Saturday afternoon, the 19 th of June at the ecclesial study weekend. Having informed you of this event, deserving of superlatives that so far elude me, I shall rewind the tale to the beginning of the weekend for a more blow by blow account. Our local BEC workers, Sister Loy and Brother Vitou, having been commissioned both by BEC Management and the ecclesia itself, diligently prepared a weekend away for the second Phnom Penh ecclesial study weekend. Eschewing the BEC as a too familiar locale for the weekend, the ecclesia chose to visit the beach town of Kampot. Kampot is the family home of our Brother Kem Kunthea and with his invitation the matter was settled. The bus departed at an hour usually reserved for those terminally obsessed by exercise and bleary eyed and sullen, we took our...

My background My name is Keo Sokhorn. I am nineteen years old, and study in the eleventh grade. My father, Keay Koel, who is 70 years old, and my mother, Om Kea, 63, are both farmers. I have five brothers and four sisters, including three half-brothers and a half-sister. At the time of the Pol Pot regime, my father had a wife, two sons and one daughter, but then his wife died. My mother had a husband during the Pol Pot regime, and had one son, but her husband died too. Afterwards, they met each other and married again. So after that, my parents had six more children, which is great that they did because I am the youngest of the six. My family are farmers: they work on the farm, planting rice, harvesting it, and selling it at the market to get income for their everyday expenses, and some to support my siblings and I to study. But that money is not sufficient for us all to study, so some of my brothers have left the family to find jobs in other provinces, getting money to support themsel...

Greetings from Kampuchea Just recently Brother Vitou and myself made the seven-plus-hour trip up to Preah Vihear to do some follow-up outreach work with our previous Bible student contacts. The bus trip in itself was no big ordeal, taking the usual rest stops along the way at the the local roadside cafes. It wasn’t until we reached Kampong Thom and de-bus-ed that things started to get interesting. We hired on with a local car transport that would drive us to our final destination. Things to me became rather dubious as I notice the four forlorn and quite balding tyres on which our lives depended. So here we proceed with our trip, five of us in all and quite happy to be out of the condensed confines of the bus. Little did I know that this was soon to change as driver proceeded to stop along the way picking up more and more passengers until we reached the capacity of eight souls. Of great interest at this point was that the detail in the road map that I had brought along, showed a fi...

We have just been blessed with another Baptism here in Phnom Penh on Sunday. We all gathered at the Olympic Pool in the sweltering heat at 7am and watched and waited for David to baptise Sokhorn. Eventually David and Sokhorn appeared in their less than desirable swim suits... as they had to wear what the pool attendants required Unfortunately we all didn’t have the best view of the event as one of cleaning staff decided to start fishing debris from the pool with a net, right around David and Sokhorn,, and so obscured everyone’s view at the time she was baptised! But that aside we now have another Sister over here, which is very exciting. We welcomed Sokhorn with the right hand of fellowship at the Memorial Meeting that afternoon. After Sister Theavy and girls at the dorms all prepared some lovely Khmer noodle for us to eat. All in all it was a very happy day for us over here in Cambodia and no doubt the Angels and our Heavenly Father were also rejoicing.

Most mornings, David and I are up and out the door by 5:45am, to start the dorm service at 6:00am. We are currently hopping through the 66 books of the Bible, summarising a book each morning. The idea is to give the dormers a little bit of background that will let them place the events and stories that they read into a bit of context. We generally cover a bit about the main themes or people in each book as well as the time and place and circumstances in which it was written. We have just got onto the minor prophets... these are the hardest books for the Khmer to find so it will be some good practice! Following that, I have a class from 6:30 – 7:30 with Sis Dany, studying from the Way of Life book. David has a class too at around that time with a small group of dormers, currently studying Old Testament stories that reveal principles we read of in the New Testament. While we are at the dorms in the early hours, Loy, Gary and Vitou all have classes to teach here at the BEC. ...

This weekend we had an Outreach programme happening. This is for students who previously came to the BEC to study but have had to move back to the province for some reason or other. So we arrange for them to come back to Phnom Penh to the BEC usually once a month for a concentrated weekend full of lessons. This month four boys – Theary, Chaileng, Sokun, and Peakday – were able to attend. This time it has fallen on the King’s Birthday Holidays. So on Friday night we all went out to a park and enjoyed watching the fireworks for the King and seeing all the other sorts of things that were happening to celebrate it. Everyone enjoyed the time out in the warm evening air. This weekend the lessons were on Baptism, Life in Christ and the Commandments of Christ. Which seems to have gone down very well and they are very interested. When not teaching the outreach students we were busy preparing and teaching other classes. The highlight would have to have been Saturday evening, which we spen...

I guess everyone will be wondering what we have been up to over here in Phnom Penh as we haven’t been very punctual at writing these blogs... Apologies for that. Well so much has happened here and we have all been very busy this last month. As you will know the BEC has changed premises. This all happened just before Khmer New Year. Then David and I went to Vietnam for a few days and Abi, Dan, Shane and Gary went to Sihanoukville, while Michael, Miriam and Loy manned the fort here over Khmer New Year. After Khmer New Year we got back into things and all our classes started up again. We decided to have an opening day for the new BEC. This was to show all our contacts where the new BEC was and to see what other classes we could take for new people that came along. We also invited previous contacts that for some reason or other have stopped coming. So Saturday the 24th April was the day planned for the opening. It started off as a normal Saturday morning, and then we started cookin...